Henry, William (Bill)

ORAL HISTORY OF WILLIAM (BILL) HENRY
Interviewed by Don Hunnicutt
Filmed by BBB Communications, LLC.
November 1, 2012
MR. HUNNICUTT: This interview is for the Center of Oral History. The date is November 01, 2012. I am Don Hunnicutt in the home of William “Bill” Henry, 111 North Tampa Lane, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to take his oral history about living in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Bill, please state your full name, place of birth, and date of birth.
MR. HENRY: William T. Henry, Jr. I was born in Gatliff, Kentucky, May 06, 1929. Gatliff was a little coal mining town. My dad was a coal miner.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your father’s name and his place of birth?
MR. HENRY: Well, Dad, William T. Henry, I’m a junior. He was born in Barbourville, Kentucky in 1884, May 22, 1884.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Your mother’s maiden name.
MR. HENRY: Nell Hardie, H-A-R-D-I-E. She was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, into a railroading family, and they, after several moves, they wound up in Oakdale, Tennessee, and that’s where my dad and my mother met. Dad went into the coal mines at age 14, in 1898, but after some years, he left and went to work the railroad, the old CNO&TP Railroad from Danville, Kentucky down to Oakdale, and that’s where he met my mother. Later on, he had some kind of a friend of his, lost his life in a railroad accident and couldn’t get any satisfaction with the company in settling for his widow, so Dad left the railroad kind of in disgust and went back into coal mines.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about your father’s school history?
MR. HENRY: Dad was orphaned as a youngster, so he had practically no formal education, 4 or 5 years, I’d say at the most. His father died when he was about 7 or 8-years-old.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about your mother’s school history?
MR. HENRY: Mom, I doubt that Mom went beyond the 8th grade. That is one of the many things I wish I had asked Mom about before she passed away, but neither one of them, I don’t think, ever graduated from high school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you have sisters and brothers?
MR. HENRY: There was 7 of us. I was the third oldest. My oldest sister, Juanell was married before we came to Oak Ridge, then my older brother, Jim, I was the third, then there were 4 more, Nedra, Tom, John, and Atha. There are 7 of us, so I’m the last survivor of a family of 9.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Why do you think your father moved the family to Oak Ridge?
MR. HENRY: Well, Dad actually was a coal miner and moved around and worked in Gatliff, Kentucky, and moved into Tennessee, and he worked at Morley, and then we moved into the mining camp of Clairfield, and Dad was severely injured in a mining accident there in Clairfield in ’39 to ’40, somewhere along about there, and was disabled for a long time, and we were living around Jellico then. And then when the Manhattan Project got started in ’42, we moved into Knoxville for some months in ’43, and then moved out here in February of ’44. Dad took a time keeper’s job over at Roane-Anderson. That is about the only kind of work he was able to do. He never was very strong after the mining accident.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How old were you when you lived in Knoxville?
MR. HENRY: I was born in ’29. That was ’43. I would have been about 14.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you were about 14 when you came to Oak Ridge with the family?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, yeah right. We moved out here in ’44. 1944 was a leap year. We moved in on the 29th of February in 1944, in a 3 bedroom flat top at 143 East Drive.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how you got to Oak Ridge from Knoxville?
MR. HENRY: No, Don, I can’t remember. I’m sure we must have had some kind of an old truck. We made a number of moves around, and I remember one where we moved in an old farm wagon, but we must have moved in a truck, but we were extremely poor. I tell you that is one reason I love Oak Ridge so much. When we came to Oak Ridge, we felt like we had arrived because it was, it was far and away the finest place we had ever lived. The only new home I had ever lived in, in my life was 143 East Drive in that three bedroom flat top.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me a little bit about your school history before you came to Oak Ridge.
MR. HENRY: Well, it was kind of, kind of erratic. I was way behind because we moved around a number of times, and then in about—in about 1942, I guess it was, in Jellico, my brother Jim was delivering groceries part-time there, and he had bought himself an old second-hand bicycle. I got to ride it a little on Sunday afternoon, and this particular Sunday, I was out doubling my kid brother Tom and went across the highway there in Jellico and got hit by a car, and it broke 3 of our 4 legs. Two of them were compound fractures, so we were in the hospital for a month and on crutches for weeks after that, so, I failed that year, so it seemed like I’d never get out of the 6th grade. I was in the 6th grade at Jellico, 6th grade in Knoxville, and the 6th grade in Oak Ridge, but then I finally got out of the 6th.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So when you started school in Oak Ridge, which school did you start in?
MR. HENRY: Well, that is one thing I wanted to particularly mention the fact that I—was in 4 Oak Ridge schools the first year they were open. We moved into East Drive, of course, and ordinarily I would have gone to Elm Grove School, but it was overcrowded, so they shipped a bunch of us, bussed a good many of us, from East Village up to Cedar Hill---so, the first school I went to was Cedar Hill. Then after a while they built some of those portable classrooms at Elm Grove out back of the building, and moved us back down there, so I finished up the ’43-’44 school year in Elm Grove. In the meantime, they were building Glenwood right up behind my house on East Drive, and I went there in the 7th grade, and then the next year that was the first year at Jefferson Junior that was down at Robertsville. I went there in the 8th grade.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, tell me a little bit about when you attended elementary school at any of the schools you attended. What did you notice different in the schools there then when you, before you came to Oak Ridge.
MR. HENRY: (Laughter) Oh, well, the difference in daylight and dark, I’m telling you, because the schools I attended prior to that were just kind of, well, as you might imagine, small town or country schools. The one I attended in Knoxville, the Moses School. It was in kind of a poor section off Western Avenue there, but Oak Ridge schools were far and way more progressive and advanced than any other school I had ever experienced. Now, the very first place I started school was in this little community called Maxey, just very near the Kentucky line out of Jellico and was a one room school. Eight grades in one room, so I had come a long way in 5 or 6 years.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you take your lunch to school when you went to school, or did they have a cafeteria?
MR. HENRY: We took a lunch before we came to Oak Ridge. I seem to remember they had a cafeteria from the very beginning at Oak Ridge. One thing about, I was, let’s see the principal, the first principal at Glenwood was Rollin Mckeehan, a wonderful man, and then the second year he transferred down to Jefferson Junior, so I had him for two years as a principal. Then in Jefferson, in the 7th grade, I had my best teacher I had, Mable Westbrook. She and her sister, I believe, were from Iowa or somewhere out in the Midwest, and Dr. Blankenship had a wonderful staff that he put together, and she was the finest teacher I ever had. She and Mr. Mckeehan had got their heads together. They knew our family situation was kind of dire, so they helped me, I guess in effect they gave me a couple or three high school credits and told me that if I would take freshman English in summer school I could skip the 9th grade and go on into high school as a sophomore, which I did. So, I was in Jefferson Junior in the 8th grade and took freshman English the following summer, and then went into Oak Ridge High School as a sophomore. Then I discovered that I could load up and go to summer school again, so I took junior English the following summer and went into that year as a senior, so I was only at Oak Ridge High School 2 years and 2 summers and graduated in 1948, and I was still 19-years-old, so I would have been a couple or 3 years behind most of my classmates.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was Jefferson Junior High School located?
MR. HENRY: It was down where, Robertsville Junior High is now.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what that school looked like when you went?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, yeah, the old original Robertsville School, of course, is still used. There have been some new structures built, but it is much expanded of course since then. I don’t remember a great deal about it. I just went there one year.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let’s go back to the flat top you lived in on East Drive. Explain what a flat top house is.
MR. HENRY: Well, it was a prefabricated—the 3 bedroom ones, the largest ones they had. The 3 bedrooms ones came in on flatbed trucks in 4 sections, furniture all in place. They were set up on a foundation that had already been erected. They just set those sections together, sealed the joints, and that was it. They were building those things. It was incredible almost if you think about it, but 35 or 40 a day were being completed. I think it is literally a fact that kids going off to school in the morning might have to be met by their parents in the afternoon because they would get all confused. Things were changing so rapidly---it was exciting.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what kind of structure the flat top was made out of, what type of wood?
MR. HENRY: It was plywood. All the furniture was fabricated, probably 1/2 inch, ¾ inch plywood. It was clean as a pin. Of course, it was the only new structure I had ever known. It was fantastic.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of heat did the flat top have?
MR. HENRY: It had a Warm Morning heater in the living room.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And how does that Warm Morning heater, is it coal fired?
MR. HENRY: Oh, it was coal fired, yeah. All the flat tops had a coal box out next to the road. Roane-Anderson delivered the coal to you. That was all part of your rent.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Roane-Anderson would deliver the coal to the coal boxes?
MR. HENRY: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How many people lived in the flat top at that time?
MR. HENRY: There were eight of us, my older sister, having gotten married before we moved to town, so there was eight of us. It was togetherness, I’ll tell you. (Laughter) I recall those things only had about a seven foot ceiling. It had three bedrooms, living room, kitchen, bath, of course, and even a walk-in pantry in probably about not more than 600 or 650 square feet, if that much.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So did you have bunk beds in the bedrooms?
MR. HENRY: We had to have bunk beds, yes. There were four boys in the one room, bunk beds, two girls in the other room, and my parents in the third bedroom.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you attended school, did you walk to school?
MR. HENRY: No, we had school buses. I walked to Glenwood, of course. It wasn’t 100 yards from where I lived, but Elm Grove, and Cedar Hill, and Jefferson, of course, we had school buses, the old olive drab Army buses, of course back then.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what time school was and what time of the morning, and what time you got out?
MR. HENRY: No I don’t, probably 8:30 to 3:00, I supposed, something like that. I don’t remember for sure.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of dress did you wear, clothes did you wear when you went to your schools before coming to Oak Ridge?
MR. HENRY: Oh, I think I wore overalls all the time before I came to Oak Ridge, maybe blue jeans and old blue work shirts, very simple, inexpensive clothing.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about when you got to Oak Ridge, and did you change your clothes, dress then?
MR. HENRY: No, no about the same the first several years, yeah, blue jeans and just an old shirt, maybe plaid shirts.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you like school?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, I think I did. I enjoyed school. Of course, like I say, our family was extremely poor, and it was kind of touch and go there for a time if I would even get to finish. My brother Jim had dropped out of school in the fifth grade to go to work and support the family because there for a time, when we lived in Jellico after Dad had his mishap, Jim was the family breadwinner making $3.00 a week, so we were still extremely hard up when we came to Oak Ridge, and we all knew that I needed to get on out of school so I could get to work. That was the reason it was kind of nice when I was able to get out of school early. I finished high school in two years because I needed desperately to get out and get to work to help at home, and I feel very fortunate-I was the first one of my family to finish high school. And the day after I graduated, I was going down to catch a bus to look for a job, and a neighbor, Emerson Brinkman, saw me, stopped and asked me where I was going, and I said, “I’m going to look for a job.” He says, “I’ll give you a job”. He was Superintendent with Roane-Anderson Building Maintenance Division. He gave me a job and loaned me $15.00 to join the Union. He had a ’39 Chevrolet, started hauling me to work, to and from work every day for a dollar a week. I was making $0.91 an hour as a laborer in the Building Maintenance Division of Roane-Anderson Company.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now let’s go back to your father’s work history a little bit when he came to Oak Ridge. Do you recall how he got back and forth to work?
MR. HENRY: Dad had to ride a bus; of course, buses were free then in Oak Ridge. Dad never had a driver’s license. Neither one of my parents were ever licensed to drive an automobile. Dad never drove, so he had to ride, had to ride public transportation.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did he ever say what his job actually consisted of?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, yeah Dad, he was just a timekeeper. Well, Roane-Anderson had been Turner Construction Company in New York, as I understand it, but they were employed by the Army to run the city, so they took care of all the municipal functions, and Dad was just a timekeeper. No one talked about what they did, but, of course, Dad worked at various places around town, and on occasional when he would be working the evening shift, I would take his dinner to him, so I knew where he worked and what he did, but it wasn’t crucial like the plant workers were.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was his job located?
MR. HENRY: Well, Dad worked for a time for the Roane-Anderson Motor Pool. Back then they had a lot of chauffeurs and chauffeurettes that drove people around, and he was over at the motor pool for a time, and then for a time he was down at, what is now, down where the dog pound is. It used to be where the trains came in. That was the railroad headquarters there. He operated down there for a time, so Dad worked, let’s see, I think back then he had mandatory retirement at age 65, so Dad turned 65 in ’49. So, yeah, he had to retire then, and he bought part interest in a little plumbing shop and did that for a while. Then he and his partner had a falling out, and Dad bought him out and tried to operate that for a while, and then he came down with tuberculosis, and, before he passed away, had emphysema silicosis and tuberculosis and died of lung cancer, March 19, 1962. All that mining activity finally got him.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you, when your family came to Oak Ridge do you recall where you first, the point of arrival was?
MR. HENRY: Oh yeah, it was at Elza Gate.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And what transpired there, that you can remember?
MR. HENRY: I don’t remember. Of course, we all had to stop and be checked and cleared and all before coming on in.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how you got from the gate to; did you go straight to the flat top?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yes, it wasn’t a mile from right across the ridge, but you had to come about a mile from Elza Gate to East Drive, where we lived.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now your mother, with having that many people in the flat top, small house, how did she manage washing clothes and the daily life of a family like that?
MR. HENRY: (Laughter) I guess, it wasn’t easy. My mom must have worked 18 hours a day, I suppose, between trying to get three meals prepared and keeping us, kind of, more or less clean. It had to be tough but she did have an old square tub Maytag washing machine. I think that is the first electric appliance Mom ever owned, so that kind of helped. A kid had to keep their fingers away from those wringers. They’d put a pinch on like you wouldn’t believe. Laundry wasn’t just Monday. I suppose it was several days a week that she had to do some laundry.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Kind of explain about the wringer type washing machine. How did that work?
MR. HENRY: Well, it had them two old rollers of hard rubber that were very close together, and, of course, they turned, and there were real stiff springs that kept those together, and you just fed the clothing into them, and it wrung most of the water out after you had rinsed them, washed them and rinsed them, but very, very primitive by today’s standards, of course.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Then what did your mother do with the clothes after she had washed them?
MR. HENRY: Oh, we had a clothes line. We didn’t have a dryer, had a clothes line out back.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall then the neighborhood ladies at the clothes line talking and having discussions?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, the ladies would visit, I’m sure, hanging up clothes. Everybody had a clothes line. I don’t believe electric dryers had even been invented back then.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember the neighborhood people or the type of people that was in your neighborhood at that time?
MR. HENRY: Oh, it was kind of cosmopolitan. It was blue collar neighborhood, but most of my early acquaintances and friends as it turned out were from similar backgrounds. Most of them were from Kentucky. We had a family of neighbors, the Dripps family, from Pennsylvania moved in next door to us, and they became our good friends. Some of the friends I met when we started going to school was the Smith family from Benham, Kentucky, and the Foley family also from Kentucky, Dunbar was from Kentucky. Most of my buddies, it turned out, were from similar backgrounds and most of them from Kentucky it seemed like.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did everyone seem to be friendly with each other?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yeah, absolutely very friendly. We bonded in a hurry. Of course, there were a lot of other folks from out of state, of course, that we got acquainted with in school. It was an exciting time for a child to be in Oak Ridge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have a telephone at that time?
MR. HENRY: (Laughter) No way. It was several years before we had a telephone. In fact, few folks had a phone. There weren’t many phones around.
MR. HUNNICUTT: After you lived in that house, did you guys move to another home?
MR. HENRY: We lived there until, let’s see, I was drafted in the Army in November 1950, and while I was gone, they moved all the flat tops out, and Dad held out and got a D house at the corner of East Tennessee and Florida, 215 East Tennessee, where Lillian Kyte lives now. She’s a good friend. So, when I came back out of the Army in October of ’52, they lived there in the D house.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Bill, let’s go back to your high school days. What type of classes, you referred to some, what were some of the other classes you took, and did you participate in sports?
MR. HENRY: Well the classes, you had to have 16 credits to get out of high school, four of which were English and a few other requirements. I knew that I had to get out of there as quick as I could, so I took basic stuff. I just worked to get the 16 credits to get out of there. In my senior year, of course, I was kind of, I never did feel like I belonged because I was only with those classes one year and never got to bond with them like those did who all went through together. So, in my senior year, I was going to go out for football, so you had to take a physical examination, but in the meantime, I had been working part-time down at the Central Bus Bar at Central Terminal, and in the evening when I got off at 10:00 in the evening, I would go across the street there to the police gym and mess around with a bunch of barbells and weights over there. So, when I went to take that physical for football, I failed the physical because I was ruptured. Messing around with those weights, I had ruptured myself, so I failed that, and I went back to the old family doctor in Jellico to have that repaired. Then when I got back to school, they decided they would try to have a varsity boxing team. Well, I never was a boxer. They kind of got me into it in Jefferson Junior for a year, but I never was any good at it, but, at any rate, I went out for the boxing team and became the heavy weight, but I was terrible, and we never have tried it again, by the way. I was a sorry boxer. It was a very, very low budget sport. I remember one time we tried to go somewhere for a bout, and had car trouble and didn’t even make it. We were in an old van. We had home and home bouts with TMI, a military school in Sweetwater and also Chattanooga Central High School, but, like I say, we were terrible. Oak Ridge High never tried it again. That was the only year there was varsity boxing. They gave us letters, but we didn’t really earn them, I don’t think. (Laughter) I was not an athlete, no.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Bill, in the summertime between school years, what did you do for fun, let’s put it that way, and also what did you do for working?
MR. HENRY: Well, very early in Oak Ridge, I took a part-time job with a milkman. Back then milk was delivered to your homes, and I worked with old Hossey Bailey, who was with Broad Acre Dairies out at Powell, delivering milk early in the morning. That wasn’t a very pleasant job in the early cold mornings.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about delivering milk. How did you, how did the people get the milk?
MR. HENRY: Well, of course, they had the little milk tokens, and the milk was in glass bottles, of course, and they would put the tokens in the bottles and set them out on the porch, and you would pick up the empty bottles and replace them with full ones and take the tokens.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, how did you know if they wanted more milk or less milk?
MR. HENRY: I guess they must have left notes, but usually they put out the number of bottles they wanted replaced.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what was some of your other jobs you had?
MR. HENRY: Later on, when I got into high school, like I say, I worked down at the Central Bus Bar, which was really a gold mine for the folks who owned it. It was in Central Bus Terminal. I believe it was open probably 21 hours a day. I think they closed between 2 and 5 in the morning to restock and catch their breath, but it was just a gold mine, absolutely like a hive of bees. It was amazing how much food was dispensed there from just a little hole in the wall spot there in the Terminal, so I worked there from 4 in the afternoon after school till 10 at night, and actually then in the evening I would go over to across the street there to what was the police headquarters then and had a little small gym in the back of that building with a bunch of weights and what not, and Beecher Keller was the best boxer that Oak Ridge produced. He was over there working out, and I was acquainted with him, so I would go over there and spend some time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall where the Central Bus Terminal was located?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yeah, it was right across from the hospital on the south side of the Turnpike. Just west of the police station, which later became ORUD and has since become the new courthouse.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The Police Department is where the courthouse-municipal court is held today?
MR. HENRY: Right.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It’s on Administration Road.
MR. HENRY: Right.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Bus Terminal Road.
MR. HENRY: Yeah, that was the original Police Department, yeah. I remember one time where they had raided some clubs and got a bunch of one armed bandits, and they had them out there in the street breaking them up with sledgehammers. I never have forgotten that. Coins were just flying everywhere.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, the bus terminal was very busy with a lot of traffic, and people stop to eat.
MR. HENRY: Oh, incredibly busy. It was certainly one of the busiest in the country I’m quite sure.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever eat in the Central Cafeteria?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yeah. On, in the evening I would have maybe, never a full meal. I don’t recall ever having had a full meal. We didn’t eat out back then. We were poor folks.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you recall the food? Was it good?
MR. HENRY: Well, I was always kind of a chow hound, so I didn’t have any bad food. (Laughter) It was always good, but common, common stuff, and very inexpensive, of course. At the Central Bus Bar, one of the conditions of my employment was that they gave me a free meal there in the evening, so I would kind of pig out there at the Central Bus Bar. I, of course, had to join the Culinary Workers Union for handling food and got a health card, and I was making 60 cents an hour when I went to work there, and we kind of got disgruntled and went on our strike for several days and got an eight cent raise to 68 cents, which percentage wise is a pretty good raise. Bill Killebrew was the guy that owned that place, and he was making a killing.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was there any other businesses in that building?
MR. HENRY: No, I believe that was the only business except the bus terminal. I believe that was it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever—I’ve heard stories about skipping school. Did you ever experience anything like that?
MR. HENRY: We called it “playing hooky” back then. One of my old buddies, J.C. Huckabee, and I played hooky one afternoon from Glenwood and went over to the river, the old L&N trestle across Clinch River back then, and on the way back we got caught on the bridge by a train, which was kind of touch and go for a time. We had steam locomotives back then. I know we had to run to stay ahead of that train, and of course, it was kind of frightening, but we got off, and we made it. I didn’t make a habit of playing hooky. I think that’s one of the very few times I ever skipped school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about boardwalks throughout the city? What do you remember about them?
MR. HENRY: Oh, boardwalks were everywhere, miles and miles of them. I remember them very well. Every town, every house, of course, had a boardwalk coming from the street to the entrance because there was so much mud. Mud was everywhere. And, yeah, the boardwalks they connected neighborhoods. They would go out through the woods—and – very interesting. I remember too, when I was working for Roane-Anderson, when the boardwalks were taken up. The rats were just everywhere on those sites. Every time you’d take up a section you had to go through rats.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, why was there so much mud here in the city?
MR. HENRY: Well, of course, they didn’t have any pavement for one thing and no sidewalks. It was just gravel, and it seemed like back then it was a good deal rainier than it is now, so every time you had rain, you had mud, and everybody seems to remember that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, tell me again about your job that you had with Roane-Anderson. Is that right?
MR. HENRY: Well like I say, it was a blue collar, just a construction—just a laborers job. We went from one end of town to the other. Really, I got intimately familiar with Oak Ridge. So many folks were coming and going, a lot of vacant houses, so we had to go out and clean out the houses and get them ready to be reoccupied, and there was also a crew. I never did work with them and didn’t want to, that actually had to go out and clean the inside of the houses and get them ready to be occupied, but Mr. Brinkman knew that I was going to become a blue collar worker all my life, so he kind of, kind of steered me into various jobs around. I remember one of the first jobs I had was inventorying a bunch of pipe fittings, just mounds of big old pipe fittings and valves and all kind of things, and then later on I did a stint with a group that installed 2-way radios in police cars, and then I worked in the wintertime with old Red Nelson, a plumber, who was winterizing houses, and I used to go around and pour Varsol in all the commodes to keep them from freezing, that sort of thing. In the summertime, then I worked with the carpenter crews that was remodeling the houses and doing what they called pre-paint work. Oh, it was just—even though the homes were really quite new, but they had to be worked on it seemed like every summer, so I did a lot of that, but it was all over town from one end to the other.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was Roane-Anderson responsible for the houses?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: …and the upkeep of the houses?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yes. They ran all of the utilities and all the maintenance of the homes, yeah, and renting and all that kind of business, yeah. They did it all.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember how the weather was? Was the weather colder than it is today, or did you have a lot of snow here?
MR. HENRY: Well, it seemed like it was colder, and I think everybody would seem to agree that back 50 years ago that winters were a little more severe, but I don’t recall any real big snows. The deepest snow I remember was in 1960, when I believe we had, in March, it seemed like we had a snow about every day in the first half of March, and I seem to remember about a foot or more of snow on the ground on March 10 in 1960. That was the most snow I ever recall around here.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you went to work did you walk, ride the bus, or did you have a bicycle?
MR. HENRY: No, I never owned a bicycle. Like I say, Mr. Brinkman hauled me to work, to and from work, for a dollar a week. He had an old ’39 Chevy. We had Mrs. Montgomery, who was the secretary, and there was a millwright foreman, Mr. Wimberley, and there was a painter foreman, called Louie Conover, and a carpenter, but they all worked at maintenance.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall where your mother did her shopping or grocery shopping?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, of course, most of our shopping was done in the shopping center in East Village. Back then there was a grocery store at East Village. Back then everything was rationed, of course. About every Saturday morning Dad would get me out early, and we would get in the line some place, usually at Elm Grove, to try to get a pound of coffee or a bag of sugar or pack of cigarettes or a candy bar or something like that. Everything was so scarce.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you talk about rationed, what do you mean by rationed?
MR. HENRY: Well, everything was rationed because of the war, so many things were short. You had ration books and had coupons. You had to take the books with you, and they would take stamps out of your ration book when you bought canned goods or meat. As I recall, red was for meat, blue was for vegetables, little fiber tokens that was your change after you cashed in those stamps. We had no gas, of course, gas was rationed, but we had no car.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember where your father got the ration coupons?
MR. HENRY: It was called OPA, Office of Price Administration, or something. But at any rate, the OPA was, everybody nationwide had those ration books, and every city had an OPA office, ration office that issued those things.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about standing in lines. I know that people were waiting for things but…?
MR. HENRY: About anything, you stood in line to do anything I’m telling you, the theaters, you’d stand in line maybe a hundred yards long and six people wide, but any time you saw a line, you just got yourself at the end of that line for anything you wanted or needed – cigarettes, like I said, coffee, sugar, to try to get a meal, to go to the show, you stood in lines. Oak Ridge was, I remember, I’ve often regretted that I don’t know if they had ever made a photograph of that or not, but the line coming from the old Castle on the Hill across the Turnpike to Central Cafeteria, I’ve seen that line, I believe, with a thousand people in it, four or five people wide just milling along trying to get into the Central Cafeteria to have a meal. That is probably the longest line I’ve ever seen, but at the Ridge Theater the lines would routinely be back all the way down to the corner of around Henebry’s Jewelers there. The line to go into William’s Drug Store for cigarettes would wind around back down to Kentucky Avenue there, but you lined up for everything.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where, where were these theaters located?
MR. HENRY: The Center Theater was where the Playhouse is now. The Ridge Theater was down on the corner of Georgia Avenue and Broadway. It was the second theater opened. I remember when it was first opened.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That’s in the Townsite of Jackson Square.
MR. HENRY: Yeah, it was in Jackson Square, yeah. The first recreation hall before the Wildcat Den was called Teen Town, and it was up in the Jackson Square Arcade—that’s where later on Royal Jewelers became. That was a busy place.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, tell me about the Teen Town. What was that?
MR. HENRY: It was, it was a recreation hall for youngsters.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And then it moved?
MR. HENRY: Yeah. Later on when the Cafeteria closed, or, no, no, it moved into the south wing of the Central Cafeteria, the Cafeteria was still open then for a time, but there in the ’46, ‘47,and ‘48, I think the Wildcat Den and Central Cafeteria was an extremely busy and popular place. That’s where Shep Lauter ran, was in charge there and ran a real tight ship. It was a lot of fun.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned Castle on the Hill, where was that and what was that?
MR. HENRY: That was, that was the Federal Building. That was the headquarters of the Manhattan Project. That was the seven wings just south of where the Federal Building is now. I remember one time part of my job when I worked for Roane-Anderson…let me think here…J.C. Franklin was the head of AEC back then. But, an old gentleman had been assigned to a carpenter crew that worked at the Castle on the Hill full-time. He was off on vacation, and they assigned me up there for a week or two, and it was in the fall of the year, and I remember I had to go up into all seven of those wings, north and south, and close a bunch of little louvers and those little cupolas that were up at the top to kind of get them ready for the winter. It was interesting work, and another thing, I remember one of my duties there every morning once you’d go into this big conference room—they had a humongous, big, old conference table that must have been eight feet wide and probably 20 feet long and had to kind of polish that with furniture polish and get it all slicked up for the big shots before they came in.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have a badge, a personal badge, ID badge?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yeah, well you had to have a resident’s badge—well that still, blows my mind—but when you became 12-years-old you had to go and get your picture made as a resident, but then, of course, I had a Roane-Anderson employee badge, of course, too.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall anyone visiting the family while you lived in the early days?
MR. HENRY: The only time I ever remember having to go get a visitor’s pass was when Jim came back from the Navy after World War II, and I had to get him a visitor’s badge and meet him at the Elza Gate so he could come home (inaudible).
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember how you proceeded to get a visitor’s pass?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, they had a Visitor’s Pass Office where you go that too, but you had to go down and get visitor’s passes to meet your, meet your friend’s coming in at the gate.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was the office located?
MR. HENRY: I don’t remember now for sure—no—Roane-Anderson had several offices around the Jackson Square area, but I don’t remember exactly where that one was.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Kind of describe the Jackson Square shopping area. What do you recall that was there?
MR. HENRY: Well, of course, the Library was on the west side of Kentucky Avenue right across from where the lawyer’s offices are now. Then later on they tore it down and moved Ridge Recreation Hall up on, up on Broadway, and the old Library then was taken down. But, on the square itself, was a William’s Drug Store on the corner where Dean’s Restaurant is now, a grocery store across on the other side where Razzleberry’s and those offices are now, the Center Theater, of course, there, and the Hamilton National Bank where the new Bradshaw Bank is now. That area was covered just north of the Emma Spray Garden, but that’s been replaced since then. But it was, Jackson Square, I love it. That was where everything took place. That was the social and commercial center of town, a very active spot.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever bowl in the bowling alley they had there?
MR. HENRY: Yes, as a matter of fact I did. There was a little bowling alley on the...back where the little craft shop arcade is there, yeah, on the lower level of Jackson Square.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember T&C Café?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: …on the corner?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, and later on the cafeteria that was built there in the parking lot just east of, let’s see…
MR. HUNNICUTT: Mayflower Grill?
MR. HENRY: Mayflower Grill, yeah, ran by Mike Cappiello.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you eat there?
MR. HENRY: Yes, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How was the food?
MR. HENRY: The food was moderate, moderately priced but quite good. It was very reasonable, common stuff.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you were growing up here did you feel safe?
MR. HENRY: Oh, absolutely, absolutely, and I don’t ever recall feeling unsafe anywhere. (Laughter) I felt, oh yeah, especially safe in Oak Ridge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I’ve been told that people didn’t lock their doors or—
MR. HENRY: No, no, there was no point in locking your doors. We didn’t have anything anybody wanted any way. (Laughter)
MR. HUNNICUTT: So after high school you went into the military?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, I worked for Roane-Anderson, of course, from June ’48, until November of ’50. The Korean War had started, of course, in the summer of ’50, and I was drafted in November of ’50, and went to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, to take infantry basic over there, and then got a few days leave over the holidays and came home. Went back down to Fort Benning, Georgia, in January of ’51, stayed there until May of ’51, and then went to Germany. The 4th Infantry Division had just been called back into active service after World War II in January of ’51, and they regrouped at Fort Benning. So I went into the Company A 4th Division combat engineers in Fort Benning, and I got lucky and went to Germany instead of Korea. In Germany, I went to mine, demolition, and booby trap school and became a demolition specialist. Very interesting work. I was in Germany 18 months. From May ’51, to October ‘52
I got out in ’52, of course got home in October of ’52 and joined the Amvets and started drinking beer down there. They had something then called 52/20. The government sent you a check $20.00 a week for 52 weeks until you got re-acclimated and got back into civilian life, so I, I enjoyed some of that for a while. But pretty soon, we got a little bit tired of that and figured maybe we ought to go to work.
There was an outfit called Guaranteed Waterproofing Company that had come into Oak Ridge from, I believe, Greensboro, North Carolina. They had a contract to reroof a bunch of these houses and paid $1.10 an hour, so several of the guys and I went down to get a job with them. It was in the summer of ’53, early summer and very hot. Our job was—the principal employees were big, black guys that would spray tar on the roof of the buildings, and we would go around with a wiping rag and a bucket of Varsol and lean down over the eaves and wipe off that tar to keep it from dripping down into the yard, and every time I would lean down over I’d think I was going to fall off and break my neck. It was very hot. So the three of us, John Hopwood, Al Dukes, and I—I believe, John quit at noon the second day, and I made it, I believe, until quitting time the second day, and Al Dukes, I believe, worked three days, so we didn’t last long. But then we had messed up our 52/20, so we had to get serious about going to work, and I heard they were taking applications for K-25, so I applied for a job and got cleared to go to K-25, but then in the meantime at Y-12 the ADP program was started, so they were needing people there, so I got hired at Y-12 instead—and so I worked there for a little over four years, had the GI Bill. In the meantime, Billie came to town in ’52 and we got married in ’55, and I had the GI Bill.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let me back you up a minute. I am curious about in 1945, when they dropped the bomb on Japan where were you, and what were your thoughts when you heard that?
MR. HENRY: Well, as everybody was, I was excited. I remember I was, I’m not even sure we had a radio, but I was at Dripps, next door neighbors there on East Drive, where I got the news, and, of course, everybody was absolutely just blown away by it, it was so exciting. Wonderful news. Of course, like I say, a lot of folks were saying they knew what was going on, but very few did. A lot of folks would say, “Yeah, I could have been trusted”, but the fact is there was very folks that knew what was going on, and certainly we did not, so it was absolutely exciting and thrilling that maybe the war was just about to be over.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, what about the gate opening ceremony in March of ’49? What do you remember about that?
MR. HENRY: That was, that was a big day, March 19, 1040, at Elza Gate. There was a huge crowd and I was right in the middle of it. There was a very large bang and everyone jumped. We weren’t expecting so much noise.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was this you were at?
MR. HENRY: That was at Elza Gate, yeah. That was an exciting day and parades everywhere all over town.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So they had opening ceremonies at Elza Gate?
MR. HENRY: Yes. I don’t think there was a ceremony at any other gate. Elza Gate was the main gate coming into town.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Had dignitaries given speeches?
MR. HENRY: Most of that was done at, later on at Blankenship Field after the big parade.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what was the “big bang” all about?
MR. HENRY: It was some kind of an arrangement they made where they burned a manganese tape that stretched across the gate there, some kind of an electrical connection from ORNL, but it was a rather loud report that you can see in the photographs. Folks were jumping back. (Laughter) It was exciting.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you attend the parade?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yes. Oh, yeah I was everywhere that day.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember about the parade?
MR. HENRY: Well, like I say, the most memorable thing was Marie McDonald. She was the star of the show, you know, and Rod Cameron riding his horse. I think he got drunk and had to have somebody help to get him saddled. We had never, I’m sure probably nobody in Oak Ridge had ever seen that many supposed dignitaries at any one time.—Adolph Menjou and Lee Bowman and old “Queen of a Day”. What’s his name?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Jack Bailey?
MR. HENRY: Jack Bailey, yeah, and then the Vice President, of course, Alben Barkley made the principal speech at the football field that afternoon. But Rod Cameron, for teenagers, Rod Cameron and Marie McDonald were the stars.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you go to any other functions that evening?
MR. HENRY: Well, most everything was free. I certainly followed the parade around, and then I was on Blankenship Field. I didn’t go to some of the festivities out at the Oak Terrace that evening where there was a dinner and a dance and that sort of thing. No, I didn’t go for any of that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The American Museum of Atomic Energy opened the same weekend. Did you attend that?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, as a matter of fact, it’s not commonly known, but I attended that when it was in a warehouse prior to that. Yeah, I attended it there. Yeah, I’m quite sure I was at the museum, the original down in Jefferson. I don’t remember for sure. That was exciting, but I do remember going to it when it was in the big warehouse out in the east end of town.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now that you’ve got a job at Y-12 and you’ve met your wife-to-be, tell me a little bit about that.
MR. HENRY: Well, Billie was a North Carolina girl. She went to college in eastern Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, and she came through Oak Ridge on a bus one time, and on the way back to Richmond, Kentucky, and was kind of excited about the place, and she asked one of her faculty advisors when she got back to school, “What about Oak Ridge”. She says, “Well, they’ve got a fine school system.” She wanted to be a teacher, so she said that’s where she wanted to go to school—or go to teach. So, she graduated from Eastern in ’52 and came to Oak Ridge to teach and taught 5th grade, and so we met in the fall of ’53 and married in the spring of ’55.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you meet her?
MR. HENRY: I met her at the Snow White, Snow White Drive-In.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about the Snow White Drive-In.
MR. HENRY: Well, the Snow White Drive-In is, if you can imagine, what Big Ed’s is now, so it was kind of like that back then. It was the meeting place. If you were out for an evening you always went by the Snow White to see what was going on before you went home, a meeting place. That was the only…that was back before the term “fast food” probably was even coined, but that was the place where everybody seemed to congregate in the evening, and, like I say, you almost always went to check it out before you went home for the evening. Billie was living in a dormitory. There were several ladies’ dormitories around the Jackson Square area, so she took a bunch of her meals down there, and we met down there in the fall of ’53.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember what the inside of the Snow White looked like?
MR. HENRY: I remember it, but I can’t describe it. It was just very, very plain. I do recall that WATO, the radio station, broadcast, Ted Lehman would broadcast his disk jockey program from there in the evening. I remember that. He used to set up out there. Later on they got one of those automated donut making machines. That was kind of, it didn’t take much to excite us back then. (Laughter) Simple times.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did they have good hamburgers?
MR. HENRY: Oh, they had good hamburgers. I remember one thing they had called a full house and would sell a bowl of chili with hot tamale for $.35, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did they have curb service?
MR. HENRY: No, no they didn’t have curb service, no. It’s little known, but prior to that being it was called the Peacock Lodge before it became the Snow White Drive-In, and later on it closed, and later on it was reopened down 100 yards or 2 further east and then closed all together. For a time, I think it was the Blue Circle, but Snow White was the place to be.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The Peacock Lodge, what do you remember about that?
MR. HENRY: About the only thing I remember about it was when old Hossy Bailey, the guy I worked with on the milk route, about halfway through our route we would meet a friend of his, Jim Burgess who also had another route in town, we’d meet down there for coffee and a donut there at the Peacock Lodge about halfway through the route and just kind of take a little break there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That wasn’t a private business? It was open to the public?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yes, it was.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you say “lodge” you kind of think about it being private.
MR. HENRY: Right, I don’t know where that name came from, but it wasn’t the Peacock Lodge all that long either.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember also about Rolling’s stores in Oak Ridge? Do you remember Rolling’s stores?
MR. HENRY: No, I can’t, I can’t remember, Don. There may have been, but I can’t recall.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about liquor and whiskey? Was that legalized in Oak Ridge?
MR. HENRY: Oh, no, no, some years later they had legalized it over in Morgan County, and the folks would go to Oakdale to buy the whiskey, but I wasn’t into hard liquor back then at all, so it didn’t concern me, but, of course, there were bootleggers. There were all kinds of stories about folks hiding it in their automobiles, so they could get it into town, but I do know a lot of folks who later on went to Oakdale to buy whiskey.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So now you’ve met your wife-to-be, and she was a teacher, lived in the dorm close—what did you do, where did you go for dating, and how did you get there?
MR. HENRY: I guess, I may have owned some sort of an old plug of an automobile back then, but we just went to the movies primarily and the Snow White, I guess, for a meal. (Inaudible)
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about the Skyway Drive-In? Did you ever attend that?
MR. HENRY: Yes, later on. I don’t recall ever going there with Billie. I may have.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That’s an outdoor theater.
MR. HENRY: Yeah. Oh, yes. No, like I say, our dating was awful low-key because I was poor folks. I really was. I tell you, that’s all I’d ever known.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So where was the first house that you and Billie lived in?
MR. HENRY: Well, we got married in February of ’55 and moved, and I’d made the mistake of not applying for a house before we got married, as I should have. You could apply for a house, and then when your name came up you could be shown a couple or three cemesto houses that were options, but so we had to move into one of the apartments on West Hunter Circle, $55.00 a month for everything, furnished as I recall. We were upstairs, 121-G West Hunter Circle, and then Dave was born in November. That was our first son, so we lived there until ’57. That’s when the houses became for sale, and we, of course, didn’t have the option to buy one, but the people who lived in the houses could buy them for 25% less than their appraised value, so we bought a B house on East Geneva Lane that had cost the guy who had the priority $3,056.00. We bought it from him for $4650 and moved there in the summer of ’57.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Bill, tell me what the apartment looked like when you lived on West Hunter.
MR. HENRY: Well, it was very small, of course. I don’t recall…one bedroom and a little old kitchen and dining area. As a matter of fact, the one we lived in right on the end of the building was the smallest one in the building. The ones out in the middle of the building were a little bit slightly larger, but it was very common but very clean and perfectly adequate for our purposes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did your wife get to work, and where did she work?
MR. HENRY: Billie began work in Willow Brook School. She taught there for three or four years. Then she transferred up to Pine Valley for a year or two, and then she transferred over to Woodland where she finished up. She was there. Of course, we had an automobile then, so she drove to school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now Willow Brook School was located where?
MR. HENRY: On Robertsville Road out at Jefferson.
MR. HUNNICUTT: …and Pine Valley was located?
MR. HENRY: Pine Valley was on New York Avenue where the School Administration is now. It’s the only original elementary school that is still there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned Woodland, what is Woodland?
MR. HENRY: Woodland is over on Manhattan Avenue. It was one of the later—of course, back in the ‘40s into ’49 and ’50 that was kind of a hutment area, kind of a swampy, hutment area where most of the colored huts were. The last year I was at Roane-Anderson, we helped move those things out when they had built the new colored area down in Gamble Valley. I remember that very distinctly. Those things were extremely primitive, the hutments were, and they would take a cable to those things and lift them onto a flatbed truck, and skunks, talk about rats out from under the boardwalks, it was skunks out from under those hutments, and the people themselves often would move their little belongings out of one hutment to the one next door, and then when they moved that one out they would have to move again. So it was, but it was kind of pitiful the way those things were.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what kind of material they were made out of?
MR. HENRY: Oh, they were made out of plywood.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember what they looked like inside?
MR. HENRY: Incredibly drab, just a little old, some kind of heater in the middle of the room and little cots around the walls, just very, very grim.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did they have a main area you went for the bathroom?
MR. HENRY: They had bathhouses, yes, that they had to go to, yeah. No running water or anything in the hutments.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Then you moved to a B house, and what is a B house, by the way?
MR. HENRY: It’s a cemesto house. There are a few G’s that are the smallest cemesto, and then there’s A’s that are a little bit larger, then B’s are next, then C’s and D’s and F’s. B’s are a nice little two bedroom, one bath house, very nice. So, like I say, we got that for $4650. We lived there for several years. Then we moved. Clyde Hatton had a C house two doors down the street, 115 East Geneva. He moved out of town, and we bought his house. I had forgotten that move cost me $6.00. I had bought my appliances from a local appliance store here in town and hired them to move my appliances, the refrigerator and range. They charged me six bucks, and everything else we just picked up and carried it down just moving two doors down the street, so that was the cheapest move I ever made.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what type of heat you had in your B house?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, we had—let’s see—they had changed out the old coal furnace, so we had electric heat, yeah. Well, let’s see, the B house, we remodeled it and moved out the old coal furnace and remodeled it and installed electric portable heaters. Then when we moved down to the C house, we also, the coal furnace had already been gone, and we had electric heat down there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned cemesto. What does that mean?
MR. HENRY: Well, it’s a building material that those semi-permanent houses were made out of. Actually, it is just two sheets of Transite with something, I think, called Homasote a couple of inches back in between those two, and there is asbestos in that material, and, of course, that became bad news. Those big sections came in. I think they were four by maybe 16 feet long, so they fabricate those things and bring them in and install them in a hurry. But, like I say, the bulk of the housing in Oak Ridge were cemestos. They were more permanent, of course, than the flat tops but supposed to be good for eight or ten years. Of course, 60 years later they’re still hanging on.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Your first son was David?
MR. HENRY: David, yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have any more children?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, yeah Dave was born in November of ’55. Bill was born in August of ’58. Like I say, after Dave was born, and Billie was working and I was working, I had the GI Bill, so we thought maybe I just kind of ought to go to school. They were having a layoff at Y-12, and I requested reduction in force and got it. By doing that I was kept on the list to be recalled, so I went to UT for two quarters, and Billie got pregnant again with Bill, so I had to kind of drop out and go back to work. I was lucky I got on again at X-10 where I finished my work career there and retired in the first of ’85.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did your children attend all of the Oak Ridge schools?
MR. HENRY: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall when your children were attending the schools, did they comment or did you see a difference than when you attended the Oak Ridge schools?
MR. HENRY: I can’t seem to remember any difference, Don. The schools had already been top notch, so I don’t recall any significant differences.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Both children graduated from Oak Ridge High School?
MR. HENRY: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And where are they today?
MR. HENRY: Dave works for the State in the Department of Environment and Conservation in Nashville. Bill just recently retired as a City Firefighter. He’s doing some woodworking now and enjoying retirement as I am. Dave just recently…it was his second marriage. He and his wife, who is an English lady, she is a registered nurse. They just recently adopted two siblings, daughters, who are 7 and 8-years-old, so I’ve got two granddaughters. Bill and Sandy were married 10 years and had no children, so they adopted a little South Korean infant, Daniel, and then five years later had one of their own, Jonathan, so I’ve got three adopted grandchildren and one natural grandchild.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When your children were going to school, was their dress different from when you attended school?
MR. HENRY: (Laughter) They dressed a little better than I did, I’m quite sure, but it was still more of the same, simple blue jeans and plaid shirts. Just, yeah, those were probably a little newer than mine were.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, things had changed quite a bit in the ‘50s from the ‘40s when you first came. What did you and your family do for recreation?
MR. HENRY: We were on our own. We didn’t do anything as a family together with Mom and Dad working all the time, and the rest of the children were pretty much on our own.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, I mean after you got married and had your own family.
MR. HENRY: Oh, yeah, well, we would take little vacations, and for a little time we did a little bit of camping. We never were too heavily into that, but we did some, a little bit of camping and that sort of thing—movies—took little family vacations here and there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you were growing up did you ever visit the Oak Ridge Hospital for any reason?
MR. HENRY: No—just to see my wife and my children, but I was never in Oak Ridge Hospital myself.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you think you had a better health program for yourself when you came here and then after you and your family got together?
MR. HENRY: Like I say, I can’t impress on you how poor we were. We were really destitute when we came, so we didn’t go to doctors very often. I remember we really didn’t go to the dentist until we had a tooth that was about to kill us, and it had to be extracted. We were, like I say, we were very poor.
MR. HUNNICUTT: During your married adult life did you belong to any clubs or organizations?
MR. HENRY: Very briefly I joined the Jaycees back in the late ‘50s. In ’59, when the Anderson County Rescue Squad was organized, I joined that. I was a charter member. I was in that a couple or three years, and then for a time I joined the Tennessee Archeological Society, but then in the mid ‘60s, when the Foothills Craft Guild got established, I was a charter member of that. I’ve been whittling for 50 years now, but I never was too much in…I never joined any fraternal organizations or such. I never did do that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Are you still whittling today?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yeah, I’m still whittling, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How do you think the city has progressed from the time you came to how you see it today?
MR. HENRY: Like I said, a good base but maybe we’ve kind of regressed, but we’ve also made some progress. Desegregation was, of course, a wonderful thing. It came much later than it should have, but Oak Ridge handled that, I guess, as gracefully as it could have been done in the South. It is still a wonderful place to live, but I can’t put my finger on it, but I guess we’ve lost something along the way, but I do feel like I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have spent all these years in Oak Ridge, and I can’t impress on anybody how much I love it because it was so much better than anything I had previously experienced in a lot of ways.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Is there anything we haven’t talked about you would like to bring up?
MR. HENRY: I believe we’ve pretty well covered it, Don. Like I say, I did mention the fact that in the first year at Glenwood School that Mr. Mckeehan kind of got us organized, and it was just a little bit kind of a military fashion we had, called school activities. Most all the boys were involved, and he even went so far as to have Artie Anderson, who was in the Army then and later on was with the police department and retired, he would come out there once a week and give us a little bit of close order drill, and we would have little sleepovers in the gymnasium on occasion, and I remember in April of ’45 we had gone on an outing over to Bacon Springs across the ridge, and we were coming back up the hill when some kids came down from East Drive and told us that President Roosevelt had died. I remember that experience very clearly. But, no, that’s pretty much it. I can’t think of anything that we missed that was particularly important, if any of this is important.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, Bill, you’re a friend of mine and always will be, and it’s been a pleasure to interview you, and I believe your oral history will be a benefit to anyone that’s doing the research about Oak Ridge history.
MR. HENRY: Well, thank you.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I thank you very much for your time.
MR. HENRY: That’s very kind of you to say that.
[End of Interview]
[Editor’s Note: This transcript has been edited at the request of Mr. Henry. However, the corresponding video and audio components remain unchanged.]

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ORAL HISTORY OF WILLIAM (BILL) HENRY
Interviewed by Don Hunnicutt
Filmed by BBB Communications, LLC.
November 1, 2012
MR. HUNNICUTT: This interview is for the Center of Oral History. The date is November 01, 2012. I am Don Hunnicutt in the home of William “Bill” Henry, 111 North Tampa Lane, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to take his oral history about living in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Bill, please state your full name, place of birth, and date of birth.
MR. HENRY: William T. Henry, Jr. I was born in Gatliff, Kentucky, May 06, 1929. Gatliff was a little coal mining town. My dad was a coal miner.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your father’s name and his place of birth?
MR. HENRY: Well, Dad, William T. Henry, I’m a junior. He was born in Barbourville, Kentucky in 1884, May 22, 1884.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Your mother’s maiden name.
MR. HENRY: Nell Hardie, H-A-R-D-I-E. She was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, into a railroading family, and they, after several moves, they wound up in Oakdale, Tennessee, and that’s where my dad and my mother met. Dad went into the coal mines at age 14, in 1898, but after some years, he left and went to work the railroad, the old CNO&TP Railroad from Danville, Kentucky down to Oakdale, and that’s where he met my mother. Later on, he had some kind of a friend of his, lost his life in a railroad accident and couldn’t get any satisfaction with the company in settling for his widow, so Dad left the railroad kind of in disgust and went back into coal mines.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about your father’s school history?
MR. HENRY: Dad was orphaned as a youngster, so he had practically no formal education, 4 or 5 years, I’d say at the most. His father died when he was about 7 or 8-years-old.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about your mother’s school history?
MR. HENRY: Mom, I doubt that Mom went beyond the 8th grade. That is one of the many things I wish I had asked Mom about before she passed away, but neither one of them, I don’t think, ever graduated from high school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you have sisters and brothers?
MR. HENRY: There was 7 of us. I was the third oldest. My oldest sister, Juanell was married before we came to Oak Ridge, then my older brother, Jim, I was the third, then there were 4 more, Nedra, Tom, John, and Atha. There are 7 of us, so I’m the last survivor of a family of 9.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Why do you think your father moved the family to Oak Ridge?
MR. HENRY: Well, Dad actually was a coal miner and moved around and worked in Gatliff, Kentucky, and moved into Tennessee, and he worked at Morley, and then we moved into the mining camp of Clairfield, and Dad was severely injured in a mining accident there in Clairfield in ’39 to ’40, somewhere along about there, and was disabled for a long time, and we were living around Jellico then. And then when the Manhattan Project got started in ’42, we moved into Knoxville for some months in ’43, and then moved out here in February of ’44. Dad took a time keeper’s job over at Roane-Anderson. That is about the only kind of work he was able to do. He never was very strong after the mining accident.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How old were you when you lived in Knoxville?
MR. HENRY: I was born in ’29. That was ’43. I would have been about 14.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you were about 14 when you came to Oak Ridge with the family?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, yeah right. We moved out here in ’44. 1944 was a leap year. We moved in on the 29th of February in 1944, in a 3 bedroom flat top at 143 East Drive.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how you got to Oak Ridge from Knoxville?
MR. HENRY: No, Don, I can’t remember. I’m sure we must have had some kind of an old truck. We made a number of moves around, and I remember one where we moved in an old farm wagon, but we must have moved in a truck, but we were extremely poor. I tell you that is one reason I love Oak Ridge so much. When we came to Oak Ridge, we felt like we had arrived because it was, it was far and away the finest place we had ever lived. The only new home I had ever lived in, in my life was 143 East Drive in that three bedroom flat top.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me a little bit about your school history before you came to Oak Ridge.
MR. HENRY: Well, it was kind of, kind of erratic. I was way behind because we moved around a number of times, and then in about—in about 1942, I guess it was, in Jellico, my brother Jim was delivering groceries part-time there, and he had bought himself an old second-hand bicycle. I got to ride it a little on Sunday afternoon, and this particular Sunday, I was out doubling my kid brother Tom and went across the highway there in Jellico and got hit by a car, and it broke 3 of our 4 legs. Two of them were compound fractures, so we were in the hospital for a month and on crutches for weeks after that, so, I failed that year, so it seemed like I’d never get out of the 6th grade. I was in the 6th grade at Jellico, 6th grade in Knoxville, and the 6th grade in Oak Ridge, but then I finally got out of the 6th.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So when you started school in Oak Ridge, which school did you start in?
MR. HENRY: Well, that is one thing I wanted to particularly mention the fact that I—was in 4 Oak Ridge schools the first year they were open. We moved into East Drive, of course, and ordinarily I would have gone to Elm Grove School, but it was overcrowded, so they shipped a bunch of us, bussed a good many of us, from East Village up to Cedar Hill---so, the first school I went to was Cedar Hill. Then after a while they built some of those portable classrooms at Elm Grove out back of the building, and moved us back down there, so I finished up the ’43-’44 school year in Elm Grove. In the meantime, they were building Glenwood right up behind my house on East Drive, and I went there in the 7th grade, and then the next year that was the first year at Jefferson Junior that was down at Robertsville. I went there in the 8th grade.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, tell me a little bit about when you attended elementary school at any of the schools you attended. What did you notice different in the schools there then when you, before you came to Oak Ridge.
MR. HENRY: (Laughter) Oh, well, the difference in daylight and dark, I’m telling you, because the schools I attended prior to that were just kind of, well, as you might imagine, small town or country schools. The one I attended in Knoxville, the Moses School. It was in kind of a poor section off Western Avenue there, but Oak Ridge schools were far and way more progressive and advanced than any other school I had ever experienced. Now, the very first place I started school was in this little community called Maxey, just very near the Kentucky line out of Jellico and was a one room school. Eight grades in one room, so I had come a long way in 5 or 6 years.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you take your lunch to school when you went to school, or did they have a cafeteria?
MR. HENRY: We took a lunch before we came to Oak Ridge. I seem to remember they had a cafeteria from the very beginning at Oak Ridge. One thing about, I was, let’s see the principal, the first principal at Glenwood was Rollin Mckeehan, a wonderful man, and then the second year he transferred down to Jefferson Junior, so I had him for two years as a principal. Then in Jefferson, in the 7th grade, I had my best teacher I had, Mable Westbrook. She and her sister, I believe, were from Iowa or somewhere out in the Midwest, and Dr. Blankenship had a wonderful staff that he put together, and she was the finest teacher I ever had. She and Mr. Mckeehan had got their heads together. They knew our family situation was kind of dire, so they helped me, I guess in effect they gave me a couple or three high school credits and told me that if I would take freshman English in summer school I could skip the 9th grade and go on into high school as a sophomore, which I did. So, I was in Jefferson Junior in the 8th grade and took freshman English the following summer, and then went into Oak Ridge High School as a sophomore. Then I discovered that I could load up and go to summer school again, so I took junior English the following summer and went into that year as a senior, so I was only at Oak Ridge High School 2 years and 2 summers and graduated in 1948, and I was still 19-years-old, so I would have been a couple or 3 years behind most of my classmates.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was Jefferson Junior High School located?
MR. HENRY: It was down where, Robertsville Junior High is now.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what that school looked like when you went?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, yeah, the old original Robertsville School, of course, is still used. There have been some new structures built, but it is much expanded of course since then. I don’t remember a great deal about it. I just went there one year.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let’s go back to the flat top you lived in on East Drive. Explain what a flat top house is.
MR. HENRY: Well, it was a prefabricated—the 3 bedroom ones, the largest ones they had. The 3 bedrooms ones came in on flatbed trucks in 4 sections, furniture all in place. They were set up on a foundation that had already been erected. They just set those sections together, sealed the joints, and that was it. They were building those things. It was incredible almost if you think about it, but 35 or 40 a day were being completed. I think it is literally a fact that kids going off to school in the morning might have to be met by their parents in the afternoon because they would get all confused. Things were changing so rapidly---it was exciting.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what kind of structure the flat top was made out of, what type of wood?
MR. HENRY: It was plywood. All the furniture was fabricated, probably 1/2 inch, ¾ inch plywood. It was clean as a pin. Of course, it was the only new structure I had ever known. It was fantastic.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of heat did the flat top have?
MR. HENRY: It had a Warm Morning heater in the living room.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And how does that Warm Morning heater, is it coal fired?
MR. HENRY: Oh, it was coal fired, yeah. All the flat tops had a coal box out next to the road. Roane-Anderson delivered the coal to you. That was all part of your rent.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Roane-Anderson would deliver the coal to the coal boxes?
MR. HENRY: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How many people lived in the flat top at that time?
MR. HENRY: There were eight of us, my older sister, having gotten married before we moved to town, so there was eight of us. It was togetherness, I’ll tell you. (Laughter) I recall those things only had about a seven foot ceiling. It had three bedrooms, living room, kitchen, bath, of course, and even a walk-in pantry in probably about not more than 600 or 650 square feet, if that much.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So did you have bunk beds in the bedrooms?
MR. HENRY: We had to have bunk beds, yes. There were four boys in the one room, bunk beds, two girls in the other room, and my parents in the third bedroom.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you attended school, did you walk to school?
MR. HENRY: No, we had school buses. I walked to Glenwood, of course. It wasn’t 100 yards from where I lived, but Elm Grove, and Cedar Hill, and Jefferson, of course, we had school buses, the old olive drab Army buses, of course back then.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what time school was and what time of the morning, and what time you got out?
MR. HENRY: No I don’t, probably 8:30 to 3:00, I supposed, something like that. I don’t remember for sure.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of dress did you wear, clothes did you wear when you went to your schools before coming to Oak Ridge?
MR. HENRY: Oh, I think I wore overalls all the time before I came to Oak Ridge, maybe blue jeans and old blue work shirts, very simple, inexpensive clothing.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about when you got to Oak Ridge, and did you change your clothes, dress then?
MR. HENRY: No, no about the same the first several years, yeah, blue jeans and just an old shirt, maybe plaid shirts.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you like school?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, I think I did. I enjoyed school. Of course, like I say, our family was extremely poor, and it was kind of touch and go there for a time if I would even get to finish. My brother Jim had dropped out of school in the fifth grade to go to work and support the family because there for a time, when we lived in Jellico after Dad had his mishap, Jim was the family breadwinner making $3.00 a week, so we were still extremely hard up when we came to Oak Ridge, and we all knew that I needed to get on out of school so I could get to work. That was the reason it was kind of nice when I was able to get out of school early. I finished high school in two years because I needed desperately to get out and get to work to help at home, and I feel very fortunate-I was the first one of my family to finish high school. And the day after I graduated, I was going down to catch a bus to look for a job, and a neighbor, Emerson Brinkman, saw me, stopped and asked me where I was going, and I said, “I’m going to look for a job.” He says, “I’ll give you a job”. He was Superintendent with Roane-Anderson Building Maintenance Division. He gave me a job and loaned me $15.00 to join the Union. He had a ’39 Chevrolet, started hauling me to work, to and from work every day for a dollar a week. I was making $0.91 an hour as a laborer in the Building Maintenance Division of Roane-Anderson Company.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now let’s go back to your father’s work history a little bit when he came to Oak Ridge. Do you recall how he got back and forth to work?
MR. HENRY: Dad had to ride a bus; of course, buses were free then in Oak Ridge. Dad never had a driver’s license. Neither one of my parents were ever licensed to drive an automobile. Dad never drove, so he had to ride, had to ride public transportation.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did he ever say what his job actually consisted of?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, yeah Dad, he was just a timekeeper. Well, Roane-Anderson had been Turner Construction Company in New York, as I understand it, but they were employed by the Army to run the city, so they took care of all the municipal functions, and Dad was just a timekeeper. No one talked about what they did, but, of course, Dad worked at various places around town, and on occasional when he would be working the evening shift, I would take his dinner to him, so I knew where he worked and what he did, but it wasn’t crucial like the plant workers were.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was his job located?
MR. HENRY: Well, Dad worked for a time for the Roane-Anderson Motor Pool. Back then they had a lot of chauffeurs and chauffeurettes that drove people around, and he was over at the motor pool for a time, and then for a time he was down at, what is now, down where the dog pound is. It used to be where the trains came in. That was the railroad headquarters there. He operated down there for a time, so Dad worked, let’s see, I think back then he had mandatory retirement at age 65, so Dad turned 65 in ’49. So, yeah, he had to retire then, and he bought part interest in a little plumbing shop and did that for a while. Then he and his partner had a falling out, and Dad bought him out and tried to operate that for a while, and then he came down with tuberculosis, and, before he passed away, had emphysema silicosis and tuberculosis and died of lung cancer, March 19, 1962. All that mining activity finally got him.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you, when your family came to Oak Ridge do you recall where you first, the point of arrival was?
MR. HENRY: Oh yeah, it was at Elza Gate.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And what transpired there, that you can remember?
MR. HENRY: I don’t remember. Of course, we all had to stop and be checked and cleared and all before coming on in.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how you got from the gate to; did you go straight to the flat top?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yes, it wasn’t a mile from right across the ridge, but you had to come about a mile from Elza Gate to East Drive, where we lived.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now your mother, with having that many people in the flat top, small house, how did she manage washing clothes and the daily life of a family like that?
MR. HENRY: (Laughter) I guess, it wasn’t easy. My mom must have worked 18 hours a day, I suppose, between trying to get three meals prepared and keeping us, kind of, more or less clean. It had to be tough but she did have an old square tub Maytag washing machine. I think that is the first electric appliance Mom ever owned, so that kind of helped. A kid had to keep their fingers away from those wringers. They’d put a pinch on like you wouldn’t believe. Laundry wasn’t just Monday. I suppose it was several days a week that she had to do some laundry.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Kind of explain about the wringer type washing machine. How did that work?
MR. HENRY: Well, it had them two old rollers of hard rubber that were very close together, and, of course, they turned, and there were real stiff springs that kept those together, and you just fed the clothing into them, and it wrung most of the water out after you had rinsed them, washed them and rinsed them, but very, very primitive by today’s standards, of course.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Then what did your mother do with the clothes after she had washed them?
MR. HENRY: Oh, we had a clothes line. We didn’t have a dryer, had a clothes line out back.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall then the neighborhood ladies at the clothes line talking and having discussions?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, the ladies would visit, I’m sure, hanging up clothes. Everybody had a clothes line. I don’t believe electric dryers had even been invented back then.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember the neighborhood people or the type of people that was in your neighborhood at that time?
MR. HENRY: Oh, it was kind of cosmopolitan. It was blue collar neighborhood, but most of my early acquaintances and friends as it turned out were from similar backgrounds. Most of them were from Kentucky. We had a family of neighbors, the Dripps family, from Pennsylvania moved in next door to us, and they became our good friends. Some of the friends I met when we started going to school was the Smith family from Benham, Kentucky, and the Foley family also from Kentucky, Dunbar was from Kentucky. Most of my buddies, it turned out, were from similar backgrounds and most of them from Kentucky it seemed like.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did everyone seem to be friendly with each other?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yeah, absolutely very friendly. We bonded in a hurry. Of course, there were a lot of other folks from out of state, of course, that we got acquainted with in school. It was an exciting time for a child to be in Oak Ridge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have a telephone at that time?
MR. HENRY: (Laughter) No way. It was several years before we had a telephone. In fact, few folks had a phone. There weren’t many phones around.
MR. HUNNICUTT: After you lived in that house, did you guys move to another home?
MR. HENRY: We lived there until, let’s see, I was drafted in the Army in November 1950, and while I was gone, they moved all the flat tops out, and Dad held out and got a D house at the corner of East Tennessee and Florida, 215 East Tennessee, where Lillian Kyte lives now. She’s a good friend. So, when I came back out of the Army in October of ’52, they lived there in the D house.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Bill, let’s go back to your high school days. What type of classes, you referred to some, what were some of the other classes you took, and did you participate in sports?
MR. HENRY: Well the classes, you had to have 16 credits to get out of high school, four of which were English and a few other requirements. I knew that I had to get out of there as quick as I could, so I took basic stuff. I just worked to get the 16 credits to get out of there. In my senior year, of course, I was kind of, I never did feel like I belonged because I was only with those classes one year and never got to bond with them like those did who all went through together. So, in my senior year, I was going to go out for football, so you had to take a physical examination, but in the meantime, I had been working part-time down at the Central Bus Bar at Central Terminal, and in the evening when I got off at 10:00 in the evening, I would go across the street there to the police gym and mess around with a bunch of barbells and weights over there. So, when I went to take that physical for football, I failed the physical because I was ruptured. Messing around with those weights, I had ruptured myself, so I failed that, and I went back to the old family doctor in Jellico to have that repaired. Then when I got back to school, they decided they would try to have a varsity boxing team. Well, I never was a boxer. They kind of got me into it in Jefferson Junior for a year, but I never was any good at it, but, at any rate, I went out for the boxing team and became the heavy weight, but I was terrible, and we never have tried it again, by the way. I was a sorry boxer. It was a very, very low budget sport. I remember one time we tried to go somewhere for a bout, and had car trouble and didn’t even make it. We were in an old van. We had home and home bouts with TMI, a military school in Sweetwater and also Chattanooga Central High School, but, like I say, we were terrible. Oak Ridge High never tried it again. That was the only year there was varsity boxing. They gave us letters, but we didn’t really earn them, I don’t think. (Laughter) I was not an athlete, no.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Bill, in the summertime between school years, what did you do for fun, let’s put it that way, and also what did you do for working?
MR. HENRY: Well, very early in Oak Ridge, I took a part-time job with a milkman. Back then milk was delivered to your homes, and I worked with old Hossey Bailey, who was with Broad Acre Dairies out at Powell, delivering milk early in the morning. That wasn’t a very pleasant job in the early cold mornings.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about delivering milk. How did you, how did the people get the milk?
MR. HENRY: Well, of course, they had the little milk tokens, and the milk was in glass bottles, of course, and they would put the tokens in the bottles and set them out on the porch, and you would pick up the empty bottles and replace them with full ones and take the tokens.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, how did you know if they wanted more milk or less milk?
MR. HENRY: I guess they must have left notes, but usually they put out the number of bottles they wanted replaced.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what was some of your other jobs you had?
MR. HENRY: Later on, when I got into high school, like I say, I worked down at the Central Bus Bar, which was really a gold mine for the folks who owned it. It was in Central Bus Terminal. I believe it was open probably 21 hours a day. I think they closed between 2 and 5 in the morning to restock and catch their breath, but it was just a gold mine, absolutely like a hive of bees. It was amazing how much food was dispensed there from just a little hole in the wall spot there in the Terminal, so I worked there from 4 in the afternoon after school till 10 at night, and actually then in the evening I would go over to across the street there to what was the police headquarters then and had a little small gym in the back of that building with a bunch of weights and what not, and Beecher Keller was the best boxer that Oak Ridge produced. He was over there working out, and I was acquainted with him, so I would go over there and spend some time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall where the Central Bus Terminal was located?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yeah, it was right across from the hospital on the south side of the Turnpike. Just west of the police station, which later became ORUD and has since become the new courthouse.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The Police Department is where the courthouse-municipal court is held today?
MR. HENRY: Right.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It’s on Administration Road.
MR. HENRY: Right.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Bus Terminal Road.
MR. HENRY: Yeah, that was the original Police Department, yeah. I remember one time where they had raided some clubs and got a bunch of one armed bandits, and they had them out there in the street breaking them up with sledgehammers. I never have forgotten that. Coins were just flying everywhere.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, the bus terminal was very busy with a lot of traffic, and people stop to eat.
MR. HENRY: Oh, incredibly busy. It was certainly one of the busiest in the country I’m quite sure.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever eat in the Central Cafeteria?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yeah. On, in the evening I would have maybe, never a full meal. I don’t recall ever having had a full meal. We didn’t eat out back then. We were poor folks.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did you recall the food? Was it good?
MR. HENRY: Well, I was always kind of a chow hound, so I didn’t have any bad food. (Laughter) It was always good, but common, common stuff, and very inexpensive, of course. At the Central Bus Bar, one of the conditions of my employment was that they gave me a free meal there in the evening, so I would kind of pig out there at the Central Bus Bar. I, of course, had to join the Culinary Workers Union for handling food and got a health card, and I was making 60 cents an hour when I went to work there, and we kind of got disgruntled and went on our strike for several days and got an eight cent raise to 68 cents, which percentage wise is a pretty good raise. Bill Killebrew was the guy that owned that place, and he was making a killing.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was there any other businesses in that building?
MR. HENRY: No, I believe that was the only business except the bus terminal. I believe that was it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever—I’ve heard stories about skipping school. Did you ever experience anything like that?
MR. HENRY: We called it “playing hooky” back then. One of my old buddies, J.C. Huckabee, and I played hooky one afternoon from Glenwood and went over to the river, the old L&N trestle across Clinch River back then, and on the way back we got caught on the bridge by a train, which was kind of touch and go for a time. We had steam locomotives back then. I know we had to run to stay ahead of that train, and of course, it was kind of frightening, but we got off, and we made it. I didn’t make a habit of playing hooky. I think that’s one of the very few times I ever skipped school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about boardwalks throughout the city? What do you remember about them?
MR. HENRY: Oh, boardwalks were everywhere, miles and miles of them. I remember them very well. Every town, every house, of course, had a boardwalk coming from the street to the entrance because there was so much mud. Mud was everywhere. And, yeah, the boardwalks they connected neighborhoods. They would go out through the woods—and – very interesting. I remember too, when I was working for Roane-Anderson, when the boardwalks were taken up. The rats were just everywhere on those sites. Every time you’d take up a section you had to go through rats.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, why was there so much mud here in the city?
MR. HENRY: Well, of course, they didn’t have any pavement for one thing and no sidewalks. It was just gravel, and it seemed like back then it was a good deal rainier than it is now, so every time you had rain, you had mud, and everybody seems to remember that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, tell me again about your job that you had with Roane-Anderson. Is that right?
MR. HENRY: Well like I say, it was a blue collar, just a construction—just a laborers job. We went from one end of town to the other. Really, I got intimately familiar with Oak Ridge. So many folks were coming and going, a lot of vacant houses, so we had to go out and clean out the houses and get them ready to be reoccupied, and there was also a crew. I never did work with them and didn’t want to, that actually had to go out and clean the inside of the houses and get them ready to be occupied, but Mr. Brinkman knew that I was going to become a blue collar worker all my life, so he kind of, kind of steered me into various jobs around. I remember one of the first jobs I had was inventorying a bunch of pipe fittings, just mounds of big old pipe fittings and valves and all kind of things, and then later on I did a stint with a group that installed 2-way radios in police cars, and then I worked in the wintertime with old Red Nelson, a plumber, who was winterizing houses, and I used to go around and pour Varsol in all the commodes to keep them from freezing, that sort of thing. In the summertime, then I worked with the carpenter crews that was remodeling the houses and doing what they called pre-paint work. Oh, it was just—even though the homes were really quite new, but they had to be worked on it seemed like every summer, so I did a lot of that, but it was all over town from one end to the other.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was Roane-Anderson responsible for the houses?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: …and the upkeep of the houses?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yes. They ran all of the utilities and all the maintenance of the homes, yeah, and renting and all that kind of business, yeah. They did it all.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember how the weather was? Was the weather colder than it is today, or did you have a lot of snow here?
MR. HENRY: Well, it seemed like it was colder, and I think everybody would seem to agree that back 50 years ago that winters were a little more severe, but I don’t recall any real big snows. The deepest snow I remember was in 1960, when I believe we had, in March, it seemed like we had a snow about every day in the first half of March, and I seem to remember about a foot or more of snow on the ground on March 10 in 1960. That was the most snow I ever recall around here.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you went to work did you walk, ride the bus, or did you have a bicycle?
MR. HENRY: No, I never owned a bicycle. Like I say, Mr. Brinkman hauled me to work, to and from work, for a dollar a week. He had an old ’39 Chevy. We had Mrs. Montgomery, who was the secretary, and there was a millwright foreman, Mr. Wimberley, and there was a painter foreman, called Louie Conover, and a carpenter, but they all worked at maintenance.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall where your mother did her shopping or grocery shopping?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, of course, most of our shopping was done in the shopping center in East Village. Back then there was a grocery store at East Village. Back then everything was rationed, of course. About every Saturday morning Dad would get me out early, and we would get in the line some place, usually at Elm Grove, to try to get a pound of coffee or a bag of sugar or pack of cigarettes or a candy bar or something like that. Everything was so scarce.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you talk about rationed, what do you mean by rationed?
MR. HENRY: Well, everything was rationed because of the war, so many things were short. You had ration books and had coupons. You had to take the books with you, and they would take stamps out of your ration book when you bought canned goods or meat. As I recall, red was for meat, blue was for vegetables, little fiber tokens that was your change after you cashed in those stamps. We had no gas, of course, gas was rationed, but we had no car.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember where your father got the ration coupons?
MR. HENRY: It was called OPA, Office of Price Administration, or something. But at any rate, the OPA was, everybody nationwide had those ration books, and every city had an OPA office, ration office that issued those things.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about standing in lines. I know that people were waiting for things but…?
MR. HENRY: About anything, you stood in line to do anything I’m telling you, the theaters, you’d stand in line maybe a hundred yards long and six people wide, but any time you saw a line, you just got yourself at the end of that line for anything you wanted or needed – cigarettes, like I said, coffee, sugar, to try to get a meal, to go to the show, you stood in lines. Oak Ridge was, I remember, I’ve often regretted that I don’t know if they had ever made a photograph of that or not, but the line coming from the old Castle on the Hill across the Turnpike to Central Cafeteria, I’ve seen that line, I believe, with a thousand people in it, four or five people wide just milling along trying to get into the Central Cafeteria to have a meal. That is probably the longest line I’ve ever seen, but at the Ridge Theater the lines would routinely be back all the way down to the corner of around Henebry’s Jewelers there. The line to go into William’s Drug Store for cigarettes would wind around back down to Kentucky Avenue there, but you lined up for everything.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where, where were these theaters located?
MR. HENRY: The Center Theater was where the Playhouse is now. The Ridge Theater was down on the corner of Georgia Avenue and Broadway. It was the second theater opened. I remember when it was first opened.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That’s in the Townsite of Jackson Square.
MR. HENRY: Yeah, it was in Jackson Square, yeah. The first recreation hall before the Wildcat Den was called Teen Town, and it was up in the Jackson Square Arcade—that’s where later on Royal Jewelers became. That was a busy place.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, tell me about the Teen Town. What was that?
MR. HENRY: It was, it was a recreation hall for youngsters.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And then it moved?
MR. HENRY: Yeah. Later on when the Cafeteria closed, or, no, no, it moved into the south wing of the Central Cafeteria, the Cafeteria was still open then for a time, but there in the ’46, ‘47,and ‘48, I think the Wildcat Den and Central Cafeteria was an extremely busy and popular place. That’s where Shep Lauter ran, was in charge there and ran a real tight ship. It was a lot of fun.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned Castle on the Hill, where was that and what was that?
MR. HENRY: That was, that was the Federal Building. That was the headquarters of the Manhattan Project. That was the seven wings just south of where the Federal Building is now. I remember one time part of my job when I worked for Roane-Anderson…let me think here…J.C. Franklin was the head of AEC back then. But, an old gentleman had been assigned to a carpenter crew that worked at the Castle on the Hill full-time. He was off on vacation, and they assigned me up there for a week or two, and it was in the fall of the year, and I remember I had to go up into all seven of those wings, north and south, and close a bunch of little louvers and those little cupolas that were up at the top to kind of get them ready for the winter. It was interesting work, and another thing, I remember one of my duties there every morning once you’d go into this big conference room—they had a humongous, big, old conference table that must have been eight feet wide and probably 20 feet long and had to kind of polish that with furniture polish and get it all slicked up for the big shots before they came in.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have a badge, a personal badge, ID badge?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yeah, well you had to have a resident’s badge—well that still, blows my mind—but when you became 12-years-old you had to go and get your picture made as a resident, but then, of course, I had a Roane-Anderson employee badge, of course, too.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall anyone visiting the family while you lived in the early days?
MR. HENRY: The only time I ever remember having to go get a visitor’s pass was when Jim came back from the Navy after World War II, and I had to get him a visitor’s badge and meet him at the Elza Gate so he could come home (inaudible).
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember how you proceeded to get a visitor’s pass?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, they had a Visitor’s Pass Office where you go that too, but you had to go down and get visitor’s passes to meet your, meet your friend’s coming in at the gate.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was the office located?
MR. HENRY: I don’t remember now for sure—no—Roane-Anderson had several offices around the Jackson Square area, but I don’t remember exactly where that one was.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Kind of describe the Jackson Square shopping area. What do you recall that was there?
MR. HENRY: Well, of course, the Library was on the west side of Kentucky Avenue right across from where the lawyer’s offices are now. Then later on they tore it down and moved Ridge Recreation Hall up on, up on Broadway, and the old Library then was taken down. But, on the square itself, was a William’s Drug Store on the corner where Dean’s Restaurant is now, a grocery store across on the other side where Razzleberry’s and those offices are now, the Center Theater, of course, there, and the Hamilton National Bank where the new Bradshaw Bank is now. That area was covered just north of the Emma Spray Garden, but that’s been replaced since then. But it was, Jackson Square, I love it. That was where everything took place. That was the social and commercial center of town, a very active spot.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you ever bowl in the bowling alley they had there?
MR. HENRY: Yes, as a matter of fact I did. There was a little bowling alley on the...back where the little craft shop arcade is there, yeah, on the lower level of Jackson Square.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember T&C Café?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: …on the corner?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, and later on the cafeteria that was built there in the parking lot just east of, let’s see…
MR. HUNNICUTT: Mayflower Grill?
MR. HENRY: Mayflower Grill, yeah, ran by Mike Cappiello.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you eat there?
MR. HENRY: Yes, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How was the food?
MR. HENRY: The food was moderate, moderately priced but quite good. It was very reasonable, common stuff.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you were growing up here did you feel safe?
MR. HENRY: Oh, absolutely, absolutely, and I don’t ever recall feeling unsafe anywhere. (Laughter) I felt, oh yeah, especially safe in Oak Ridge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I’ve been told that people didn’t lock their doors or—
MR. HENRY: No, no, there was no point in locking your doors. We didn’t have anything anybody wanted any way. (Laughter)
MR. HUNNICUTT: So after high school you went into the military?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, I worked for Roane-Anderson, of course, from June ’48, until November of ’50. The Korean War had started, of course, in the summer of ’50, and I was drafted in November of ’50, and went to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, to take infantry basic over there, and then got a few days leave over the holidays and came home. Went back down to Fort Benning, Georgia, in January of ’51, stayed there until May of ’51, and then went to Germany. The 4th Infantry Division had just been called back into active service after World War II in January of ’51, and they regrouped at Fort Benning. So I went into the Company A 4th Division combat engineers in Fort Benning, and I got lucky and went to Germany instead of Korea. In Germany, I went to mine, demolition, and booby trap school and became a demolition specialist. Very interesting work. I was in Germany 18 months. From May ’51, to October ‘52
I got out in ’52, of course got home in October of ’52 and joined the Amvets and started drinking beer down there. They had something then called 52/20. The government sent you a check $20.00 a week for 52 weeks until you got re-acclimated and got back into civilian life, so I, I enjoyed some of that for a while. But pretty soon, we got a little bit tired of that and figured maybe we ought to go to work.
There was an outfit called Guaranteed Waterproofing Company that had come into Oak Ridge from, I believe, Greensboro, North Carolina. They had a contract to reroof a bunch of these houses and paid $1.10 an hour, so several of the guys and I went down to get a job with them. It was in the summer of ’53, early summer and very hot. Our job was—the principal employees were big, black guys that would spray tar on the roof of the buildings, and we would go around with a wiping rag and a bucket of Varsol and lean down over the eaves and wipe off that tar to keep it from dripping down into the yard, and every time I would lean down over I’d think I was going to fall off and break my neck. It was very hot. So the three of us, John Hopwood, Al Dukes, and I—I believe, John quit at noon the second day, and I made it, I believe, until quitting time the second day, and Al Dukes, I believe, worked three days, so we didn’t last long. But then we had messed up our 52/20, so we had to get serious about going to work, and I heard they were taking applications for K-25, so I applied for a job and got cleared to go to K-25, but then in the meantime at Y-12 the ADP program was started, so they were needing people there, so I got hired at Y-12 instead—and so I worked there for a little over four years, had the GI Bill. In the meantime, Billie came to town in ’52 and we got married in ’55, and I had the GI Bill.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let me back you up a minute. I am curious about in 1945, when they dropped the bomb on Japan where were you, and what were your thoughts when you heard that?
MR. HENRY: Well, as everybody was, I was excited. I remember I was, I’m not even sure we had a radio, but I was at Dripps, next door neighbors there on East Drive, where I got the news, and, of course, everybody was absolutely just blown away by it, it was so exciting. Wonderful news. Of course, like I say, a lot of folks were saying they knew what was going on, but very few did. A lot of folks would say, “Yeah, I could have been trusted”, but the fact is there was very folks that knew what was going on, and certainly we did not, so it was absolutely exciting and thrilling that maybe the war was just about to be over.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, what about the gate opening ceremony in March of ’49? What do you remember about that?
MR. HENRY: That was, that was a big day, March 19, 1040, at Elza Gate. There was a huge crowd and I was right in the middle of it. There was a very large bang and everyone jumped. We weren’t expecting so much noise.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where was this you were at?
MR. HENRY: That was at Elza Gate, yeah. That was an exciting day and parades everywhere all over town.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So they had opening ceremonies at Elza Gate?
MR. HENRY: Yes. I don’t think there was a ceremony at any other gate. Elza Gate was the main gate coming into town.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Had dignitaries given speeches?
MR. HENRY: Most of that was done at, later on at Blankenship Field after the big parade.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what was the “big bang” all about?
MR. HENRY: It was some kind of an arrangement they made where they burned a manganese tape that stretched across the gate there, some kind of an electrical connection from ORNL, but it was a rather loud report that you can see in the photographs. Folks were jumping back. (Laughter) It was exciting.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you attend the parade?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yes. Oh, yeah I was everywhere that day.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember about the parade?
MR. HENRY: Well, like I say, the most memorable thing was Marie McDonald. She was the star of the show, you know, and Rod Cameron riding his horse. I think he got drunk and had to have somebody help to get him saddled. We had never, I’m sure probably nobody in Oak Ridge had ever seen that many supposed dignitaries at any one time.—Adolph Menjou and Lee Bowman and old “Queen of a Day”. What’s his name?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Jack Bailey?
MR. HENRY: Jack Bailey, yeah, and then the Vice President, of course, Alben Barkley made the principal speech at the football field that afternoon. But Rod Cameron, for teenagers, Rod Cameron and Marie McDonald were the stars.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you go to any other functions that evening?
MR. HENRY: Well, most everything was free. I certainly followed the parade around, and then I was on Blankenship Field. I didn’t go to some of the festivities out at the Oak Terrace that evening where there was a dinner and a dance and that sort of thing. No, I didn’t go for any of that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The American Museum of Atomic Energy opened the same weekend. Did you attend that?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, as a matter of fact, it’s not commonly known, but I attended that when it was in a warehouse prior to that. Yeah, I attended it there. Yeah, I’m quite sure I was at the museum, the original down in Jefferson. I don’t remember for sure. That was exciting, but I do remember going to it when it was in the big warehouse out in the east end of town.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now that you’ve got a job at Y-12 and you’ve met your wife-to-be, tell me a little bit about that.
MR. HENRY: Well, Billie was a North Carolina girl. She went to college in eastern Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, and she came through Oak Ridge on a bus one time, and on the way back to Richmond, Kentucky, and was kind of excited about the place, and she asked one of her faculty advisors when she got back to school, “What about Oak Ridge”. She says, “Well, they’ve got a fine school system.” She wanted to be a teacher, so she said that’s where she wanted to go to school—or go to teach. So, she graduated from Eastern in ’52 and came to Oak Ridge to teach and taught 5th grade, and so we met in the fall of ’53 and married in the spring of ’55.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you meet her?
MR. HENRY: I met her at the Snow White, Snow White Drive-In.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about the Snow White Drive-In.
MR. HENRY: Well, the Snow White Drive-In is, if you can imagine, what Big Ed’s is now, so it was kind of like that back then. It was the meeting place. If you were out for an evening you always went by the Snow White to see what was going on before you went home, a meeting place. That was the only…that was back before the term “fast food” probably was even coined, but that was the place where everybody seemed to congregate in the evening, and, like I say, you almost always went to check it out before you went home for the evening. Billie was living in a dormitory. There were several ladies’ dormitories around the Jackson Square area, so she took a bunch of her meals down there, and we met down there in the fall of ’53.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember what the inside of the Snow White looked like?
MR. HENRY: I remember it, but I can’t describe it. It was just very, very plain. I do recall that WATO, the radio station, broadcast, Ted Lehman would broadcast his disk jockey program from there in the evening. I remember that. He used to set up out there. Later on they got one of those automated donut making machines. That was kind of, it didn’t take much to excite us back then. (Laughter) Simple times.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did they have good hamburgers?
MR. HENRY: Oh, they had good hamburgers. I remember one thing they had called a full house and would sell a bowl of chili with hot tamale for $.35, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did they have curb service?
MR. HENRY: No, no they didn’t have curb service, no. It’s little known, but prior to that being it was called the Peacock Lodge before it became the Snow White Drive-In, and later on it closed, and later on it was reopened down 100 yards or 2 further east and then closed all together. For a time, I think it was the Blue Circle, but Snow White was the place to be.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The Peacock Lodge, what do you remember about that?
MR. HENRY: About the only thing I remember about it was when old Hossy Bailey, the guy I worked with on the milk route, about halfway through our route we would meet a friend of his, Jim Burgess who also had another route in town, we’d meet down there for coffee and a donut there at the Peacock Lodge about halfway through the route and just kind of take a little break there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That wasn’t a private business? It was open to the public?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yes, it was.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you say “lodge” you kind of think about it being private.
MR. HENRY: Right, I don’t know where that name came from, but it wasn’t the Peacock Lodge all that long either.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What do you remember also about Rolling’s stores in Oak Ridge? Do you remember Rolling’s stores?
MR. HENRY: No, I can’t, I can’t remember, Don. There may have been, but I can’t recall.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about liquor and whiskey? Was that legalized in Oak Ridge?
MR. HENRY: Oh, no, no, some years later they had legalized it over in Morgan County, and the folks would go to Oakdale to buy the whiskey, but I wasn’t into hard liquor back then at all, so it didn’t concern me, but, of course, there were bootleggers. There were all kinds of stories about folks hiding it in their automobiles, so they could get it into town, but I do know a lot of folks who later on went to Oakdale to buy whiskey.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So now you’ve met your wife-to-be, and she was a teacher, lived in the dorm close—what did you do, where did you go for dating, and how did you get there?
MR. HENRY: I guess, I may have owned some sort of an old plug of an automobile back then, but we just went to the movies primarily and the Snow White, I guess, for a meal. (Inaudible)
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about the Skyway Drive-In? Did you ever attend that?
MR. HENRY: Yes, later on. I don’t recall ever going there with Billie. I may have.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That’s an outdoor theater.
MR. HENRY: Yeah. Oh, yes. No, like I say, our dating was awful low-key because I was poor folks. I really was. I tell you, that’s all I’d ever known.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So where was the first house that you and Billie lived in?
MR. HENRY: Well, we got married in February of ’55 and moved, and I’d made the mistake of not applying for a house before we got married, as I should have. You could apply for a house, and then when your name came up you could be shown a couple or three cemesto houses that were options, but so we had to move into one of the apartments on West Hunter Circle, $55.00 a month for everything, furnished as I recall. We were upstairs, 121-G West Hunter Circle, and then Dave was born in November. That was our first son, so we lived there until ’57. That’s when the houses became for sale, and we, of course, didn’t have the option to buy one, but the people who lived in the houses could buy them for 25% less than their appraised value, so we bought a B house on East Geneva Lane that had cost the guy who had the priority $3,056.00. We bought it from him for $4650 and moved there in the summer of ’57.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Bill, tell me what the apartment looked like when you lived on West Hunter.
MR. HENRY: Well, it was very small, of course. I don’t recall…one bedroom and a little old kitchen and dining area. As a matter of fact, the one we lived in right on the end of the building was the smallest one in the building. The ones out in the middle of the building were a little bit slightly larger, but it was very common but very clean and perfectly adequate for our purposes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How did your wife get to work, and where did she work?
MR. HENRY: Billie began work in Willow Brook School. She taught there for three or four years. Then she transferred up to Pine Valley for a year or two, and then she transferred over to Woodland where she finished up. She was there. Of course, we had an automobile then, so she drove to school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now Willow Brook School was located where?
MR. HENRY: On Robertsville Road out at Jefferson.
MR. HUNNICUTT: …and Pine Valley was located?
MR. HENRY: Pine Valley was on New York Avenue where the School Administration is now. It’s the only original elementary school that is still there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned Woodland, what is Woodland?
MR. HENRY: Woodland is over on Manhattan Avenue. It was one of the later—of course, back in the ‘40s into ’49 and ’50 that was kind of a hutment area, kind of a swampy, hutment area where most of the colored huts were. The last year I was at Roane-Anderson, we helped move those things out when they had built the new colored area down in Gamble Valley. I remember that very distinctly. Those things were extremely primitive, the hutments were, and they would take a cable to those things and lift them onto a flatbed truck, and skunks, talk about rats out from under the boardwalks, it was skunks out from under those hutments, and the people themselves often would move their little belongings out of one hutment to the one next door, and then when they moved that one out they would have to move again. So it was, but it was kind of pitiful the way those things were.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what kind of material they were made out of?
MR. HENRY: Oh, they were made out of plywood.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember what they looked like inside?
MR. HENRY: Incredibly drab, just a little old, some kind of heater in the middle of the room and little cots around the walls, just very, very grim.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did they have a main area you went for the bathroom?
MR. HENRY: They had bathhouses, yes, that they had to go to, yeah. No running water or anything in the hutments.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Then you moved to a B house, and what is a B house, by the way?
MR. HENRY: It’s a cemesto house. There are a few G’s that are the smallest cemesto, and then there’s A’s that are a little bit larger, then B’s are next, then C’s and D’s and F’s. B’s are a nice little two bedroom, one bath house, very nice. So, like I say, we got that for $4650. We lived there for several years. Then we moved. Clyde Hatton had a C house two doors down the street, 115 East Geneva. He moved out of town, and we bought his house. I had forgotten that move cost me $6.00. I had bought my appliances from a local appliance store here in town and hired them to move my appliances, the refrigerator and range. They charged me six bucks, and everything else we just picked up and carried it down just moving two doors down the street, so that was the cheapest move I ever made.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what type of heat you had in your B house?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, we had—let’s see—they had changed out the old coal furnace, so we had electric heat, yeah. Well, let’s see, the B house, we remodeled it and moved out the old coal furnace and remodeled it and installed electric portable heaters. Then when we moved down to the C house, we also, the coal furnace had already been gone, and we had electric heat down there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned cemesto. What does that mean?
MR. HENRY: Well, it’s a building material that those semi-permanent houses were made out of. Actually, it is just two sheets of Transite with something, I think, called Homasote a couple of inches back in between those two, and there is asbestos in that material, and, of course, that became bad news. Those big sections came in. I think they were four by maybe 16 feet long, so they fabricate those things and bring them in and install them in a hurry. But, like I say, the bulk of the housing in Oak Ridge were cemestos. They were more permanent, of course, than the flat tops but supposed to be good for eight or ten years. Of course, 60 years later they’re still hanging on.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Your first son was David?
MR. HENRY: David, yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have any more children?
MR. HENRY: Yeah, yeah Dave was born in November of ’55. Bill was born in August of ’58. Like I say, after Dave was born, and Billie was working and I was working, I had the GI Bill, so we thought maybe I just kind of ought to go to school. They were having a layoff at Y-12, and I requested reduction in force and got it. By doing that I was kept on the list to be recalled, so I went to UT for two quarters, and Billie got pregnant again with Bill, so I had to kind of drop out and go back to work. I was lucky I got on again at X-10 where I finished my work career there and retired in the first of ’85.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did your children attend all of the Oak Ridge schools?
MR. HENRY: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall when your children were attending the schools, did they comment or did you see a difference than when you attended the Oak Ridge schools?
MR. HENRY: I can’t seem to remember any difference, Don. The schools had already been top notch, so I don’t recall any significant differences.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Both children graduated from Oak Ridge High School?
MR. HENRY: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And where are they today?
MR. HENRY: Dave works for the State in the Department of Environment and Conservation in Nashville. Bill just recently retired as a City Firefighter. He’s doing some woodworking now and enjoying retirement as I am. Dave just recently…it was his second marriage. He and his wife, who is an English lady, she is a registered nurse. They just recently adopted two siblings, daughters, who are 7 and 8-years-old, so I’ve got two granddaughters. Bill and Sandy were married 10 years and had no children, so they adopted a little South Korean infant, Daniel, and then five years later had one of their own, Jonathan, so I’ve got three adopted grandchildren and one natural grandchild.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When your children were going to school, was their dress different from when you attended school?
MR. HENRY: (Laughter) They dressed a little better than I did, I’m quite sure, but it was still more of the same, simple blue jeans and plaid shirts. Just, yeah, those were probably a little newer than mine were.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, things had changed quite a bit in the ‘50s from the ‘40s when you first came. What did you and your family do for recreation?
MR. HENRY: We were on our own. We didn’t do anything as a family together with Mom and Dad working all the time, and the rest of the children were pretty much on our own.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, I mean after you got married and had your own family.
MR. HENRY: Oh, yeah, well, we would take little vacations, and for a little time we did a little bit of camping. We never were too heavily into that, but we did some, a little bit of camping and that sort of thing—movies—took little family vacations here and there.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you were growing up did you ever visit the Oak Ridge Hospital for any reason?
MR. HENRY: No—just to see my wife and my children, but I was never in Oak Ridge Hospital myself.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you think you had a better health program for yourself when you came here and then after you and your family got together?
MR. HENRY: Like I say, I can’t impress on you how poor we were. We were really destitute when we came, so we didn’t go to doctors very often. I remember we really didn’t go to the dentist until we had a tooth that was about to kill us, and it had to be extracted. We were, like I say, we were very poor.
MR. HUNNICUTT: During your married adult life did you belong to any clubs or organizations?
MR. HENRY: Very briefly I joined the Jaycees back in the late ‘50s. In ’59, when the Anderson County Rescue Squad was organized, I joined that. I was a charter member. I was in that a couple or three years, and then for a time I joined the Tennessee Archeological Society, but then in the mid ‘60s, when the Foothills Craft Guild got established, I was a charter member of that. I’ve been whittling for 50 years now, but I never was too much in…I never joined any fraternal organizations or such. I never did do that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Are you still whittling today?
MR. HENRY: Oh, yeah, I’m still whittling, yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How do you think the city has progressed from the time you came to how you see it today?
MR. HENRY: Like I said, a good base but maybe we’ve kind of regressed, but we’ve also made some progress. Desegregation was, of course, a wonderful thing. It came much later than it should have, but Oak Ridge handled that, I guess, as gracefully as it could have been done in the South. It is still a wonderful place to live, but I can’t put my finger on it, but I guess we’ve lost something along the way, but I do feel like I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have spent all these years in Oak Ridge, and I can’t impress on anybody how much I love it because it was so much better than anything I had previously experienced in a lot of ways.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Is there anything we haven’t talked about you would like to bring up?
MR. HENRY: I believe we’ve pretty well covered it, Don. Like I say, I did mention the fact that in the first year at Glenwood School that Mr. Mckeehan kind of got us organized, and it was just a little bit kind of a military fashion we had, called school activities. Most all the boys were involved, and he even went so far as to have Artie Anderson, who was in the Army then and later on was with the police department and retired, he would come out there once a week and give us a little bit of close order drill, and we would have little sleepovers in the gymnasium on occasion, and I remember in April of ’45 we had gone on an outing over to Bacon Springs across the ridge, and we were coming back up the hill when some kids came down from East Drive and told us that President Roosevelt had died. I remember that experience very clearly. But, no, that’s pretty much it. I can’t think of anything that we missed that was particularly important, if any of this is important.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, Bill, you’re a friend of mine and always will be, and it’s been a pleasure to interview you, and I believe your oral history will be a benefit to anyone that’s doing the research about Oak Ridge history.
MR. HENRY: Well, thank you.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I thank you very much for your time.
MR. HENRY: That’s very kind of you to say that.
[End of Interview]
[Editor’s Note: This transcript has been edited at the request of Mr. Henry. However, the corresponding video and audio components remain unchanged.]